Rants & Reviews

11 November 2018

Remembering Doreen Gordon who has died at 93

My friend Doreen Gordon is dead at 93. I met her when she signed up for my senior fitness classes at the Brookline Senior Center and she rapidly became the keystone to our community. Not only did she find ways to connect otherwise isolated seniors with each other, she inspired the personality of Lillian, the protagonist in my short story in the collection Lillian’s Last Affair. Well, in one sense. The old-woman-talking-like-a-sailor sense. More about that below. (From left: Doreen, Yolanda, me)

Doreen came from quite a posh South African background, lived a cultured life in New York with her late husband and two incredible daughters Jenny and Amy, and then moved to Boston to be close to one daughter and granddaughter after she recovered from being hit by a damned bus. Doreen was such a petite and put-together woman that between herself and the bus, it was not a fair fight.

To build connection among my students, Doreen began hosting high teas in her fabulous apartment, taking us group by group. Her closest friend from the class, Yolanda, often attended all the groups. We’d have finger sandwiches with salmon and the most luxurious selection of pastries known to human taste buds. I was often tempted to steal the leftovers – friendship be damned – but in fact she often made me up a care package with my favorites: the mini-scones and the crispy almond cookies. (Tea Party: Doreen third from right, laughing)

She used her baking skills to bring joy to every occasion we could find to celebrate, refusing to take money for the ingredients. She picked out the movies for us to see on senior discount matinee day. She told me privately when I was being too hard on someone in the class, or too soft. Doreen and I had what amounted to a secret consultation phone relationship behind the scene of our group. We talked about everyone and everything. She hooked me up with her daughter Jenny when I went to New Orleans for the first time, and Jenny pointed me to all the right places. Doreen invited me a few times to join her to watch the Boston Marathon on the sidewalk in front of her daughter Amy’s house, which is on the route. Amy would have oranges to peel so that we could hold sections in the flat of our hands for the runners to grab. It was on the way home from one such afternoon that my train was stopped at Kenmore Square and we all had to get off and run upstairs. The Marathon bombs had just gone off at the next stop. (Marathon day: Doreen and Amy in center)

But I digress. How did she inspire the character of Lillian? One day in the run-up to the 2008 election, we went to Trader Joe’s together (something we did a number of times). As we crossed the main intersection of Brookline at Beacon and Harvard, there was a man holding a huge sign, a large poster of Barak Obama with a Hitler mustache. Doreen walked right up to him, looked up to his face a good foot or so above her, and hissed, “Fuck You!”

I’m sure this man had already put up with plenty of abuse in that spot in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood, but he never anticipated such a curse from this tiny lovely white-haired woman. Later she told me that she had spent her whole life being prim and proper, but at this point she no longer felt the need to restrain herself. And with that sentence, the character of Lillian was born in my imagination, a woman who perfected swearing late in life.

Life is full of losses as we age, and this is a biggie. I’m only sorry that Doreen, with her love of humans and music and art and travel and good food, had to spend her final period under the regime of tRump. Many in the community which she built among my students pre-deceased her, but next Saturday I will be able to connect with dear Yolanda, with Doreen’s precious family, and with those of us who are lucky to still be around to mourn her.